Progress Update and V0.05 Announcement!

Hey everyone!

We're aiming to release V0.05 of Malise and the Machine on September 10!  

This means that your pledges will be processed at the end of August / beginning of September.  This will be the last update before we switch over to the new campaign model (unless Patreon for some reason hasn't rolled out the instant charge feature for all creators yet).  

What this means is that we will be distributing the rewards the same way we've been doing it (you'll receive links via Patreon messages).  I'll announce in a future post once we've switched over to the monthly model so that you can change your pledge amounts to match the new reward tiers, which will be made available at the time of the transition.  This will likely occur sometime in October.

Progress Update

Work on V0.05 is going great, and all of our work is surpassing the quality I could've expected.  Naturally, we'll be down to the wire as far as getting in everything we want to, but at this point I'm pretty sure that's the price for pushing our creative limits.  Here's a quick rundown of the major accomplishments since the last post: 

• We released an interim build for Inner Circle members on August 3 that contains a preview of Neon's new outfit in action and AltairPL's map overhaul framework.  We received a few bug reports that we've fixed, but nothing major, which is pretty outstanding considering the entire map engine was ripped out and rewritten.
• As mentioned above, we have the mechanics for changing outfit types in place, along with most of the necessary UI edits.
• I have a total of 87 portraits for Neon's new outfit completed, as well as the map sprites.  I think this is a testament to our workflow / organization / software optimizations because I don't think I could have done this previously in this amount of time.  I still have quite a few to go, by the way.
• I have quite a bit of artwork done for a new story H scene, but still have a ways to go.
• TK's 3D map editor is functioning and he is beginning to put out some great results with it.  He's recreated the Access Tunnels Entrance map as the first true test, and while we still have some kinks to work out and a couple of features to add, it's a proof of concept that we'll be able to create more visually interesting maps that maintain the original style in much less time than it took me to process and assemble the old ones by hand.
• AltairPL's map overhaul now has all of the major features working, including a lot of features that will make creating map events easier for us.  As it turns out, the overhaul came at the perfect time because it would have been nearly impossible to do what we are doing with TK's map editor without some of the major internal changes.  If you're curious about the performance boost, my mid-high end machine went from 70 FPS to 110 FPS on the map (with the 60 FPS limit off mind you... note that if you had really good performance before the overhaul it will be less mind blowing, but a big part of it is that it gives us more room to do crazy stuff in the future).

We're basically on track toward accomplishing everything we set out to for V0.05 as listed under 'Question 7' in this post right here, so if you're curious as to what V0.05 will look like you should get a pretty good idea from that.  Probably more than any other release this one will resemble an iceberg in that what you see is a small fraction of the work done to improve future releases.  Expect a more detailed list of all the features (front and back-end) once we get closer to the release, but in the meantime feel free to ask any questions!

Lastly, I want to mention that we got a lot of interest in the community manager position I mentioned awhile back, and I want to thank everyone that took the time to talk to me.  I decided it's best for us to get a feel of how the community environment and task requirements will change once we move to the new campaign model before bringing someone on, since part of the goal of the new campaign model is to reduce workload related to distributing rewards.  It's likely that the position will more heavily involve promotional work because recently there's been zero effort going into promoting the game due to effort going toward development.

That's it for now, and thanks again for your continued support!